Evolution Disclaimer Supported

The Advocate (Baton Rouge) ^ | 12/11/02 | WILL SENTELL

[A2J]

By WILL SENTELL

wsentell@theadvocate.com

Capitol news bureau

High school biology textbooks would include a disclaimer that evolution is only a theory under a change approved Tuesday by a committee of the state's top school board.

If the disclaimer wins final approval, it would apparently make Louisiana just the second state in the nation with such a provision. The other is Alabama, which is the model for the disclaimer backers want in Louisiana.

Alabama approved its policy six or seven years ago after extensive controversy that included questions over the religious overtones of the issue.

The change approved Tuesday requires Louisiana education officials to check on details for getting publishers to add the disclaimer to biology textbooks.

It won approval in the board's Student and School Standards/ Instruction Committee after a sometimes contentious session.

"I don't believe I evolved from some primate," said Jim Stafford, a board member from Monroe. Stafford said evolution should be offered as a theory, not fact.

Whether the proposal will win approval by the full state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education on Thursday is unclear.

Paul Pastorek of New Orleans, president of the board, said he will oppose the addition.

"I am not prepared to go back to the Dark Ages," Pastorek said.

"I don't think state boards should dictate editorial content of school textbooks," he said. "We shouldn't be involved with that."

Donna Contois of Metairie, chairwoman of the committee that approved the change, said afterward she could not say whether it will win approval by the full board.

The disclaimer under consideration says the theory of evolution "still leaves many unanswered questions about the origin of life.

"Study hard and keep an open mind," it says. "Someday you may contribute to the theories of how living things appeared on earth."

Backers say the addition would be inserted in the front of biology textbooks used by students in grades 9-12, possibly next fall.

The issue surfaced when a committee of the board prepared to approve dozens of textbooks used by both public and nonpublic schools. The list was recommended by a separate panel that reviews textbooks every seven years.

A handful of citizens, one armed with a copy of Charles Darwin's "Origin of the Species," complained that biology textbooks used now are one-sided in promoting evolution uncritically and are riddled with factual errors.

"If we give them all the facts to make up their mind, we have educated them," Darrell White of Baton Rouge said of students. "Otherwise we have indoctrinated them."

Darwin wrote that individuals with certain characteristics enjoy an edge over their peers and life forms developed gradually millions of years ago.

Backers bristled at suggestions that they favor the teaching of creationism, which says that life began about 6,000 years ago in a process described in the Bible's Book of Genesis.

White said he is the father of seven children, including a 10th-grader at a public high school in Baton Rouge.

He said he reviewed 21 science textbooks for use by middle and high school students. White called Darwin's book "racist and sexist" and said students are entitled to know more about controversy that swirls around the theory.

"If nothing else, put a disclaimer in the front of the textbooks," White said.

John Oller Jr., a professor at the University of Louisiana-Lafayette, also criticized the accuracy of science textbooks under review. Oller said he was appearing on behalf of the Louisiana Family Forum, a Christian lobbying group.

Oller said the state should force publishers to offer alternatives, correct mistakes in textbooks and fill in gaps in science teachings. "We are talking about major falsehoods that should be addressed," he said.

Linda Johnson of Plaquemine, a member of the board, said she supports the change. Johnson said the new message of evolution "will encourage students to go after the facts."

[titanmike]

Then explain the varves that are laid down seasonally and extend back farther than the Bible allows.

Don't get me wrong; the world does appear to be older than the 6000 years deduced by Bishop Usher. Nonetheless the billion-year figures you see in geology books do not appear to be on any firmer ground than the bishop's calculations were.

Varves are one example of the problems involved.

David Plaisted notes that the entire general manner in which geological layering processes are interpreted by geologists is flawed in a number of ways.

A vew examples:

Some thick and extensive sedimentary layers have remarkable purity. The St. Peter sandstone, spanning about 500,000 square miles in the central United States, is composed of almost pure quartz, similar to the sand on a white beach. It is hard to imagine how any process, other than global liquefaction, could achieve this degree of purity over such a wide area. 16 Almost all other processes involve mixing, which destroys purity.

Streams and rivers act on a small fraction of the available sediments and deposit them along a narrow line, but strata are not linear features. Liquefaction during the flood acted on all sediments and sorted them over large areas in a matter of weeks or months.

Sedimentary layers usually have boundaries that are sharply defined, parallel, and nearly horizontal. Thin, sharply defined layers are sometimes stacked vertically, thousands of feet deep. If each layer had been laid down thousands of years apart, erosion would have destroyed this parallelism. Again, liquefaction explains this common observation...

Varves are extremely thin layers which evolutionists claim, without much justification, are laid down annually in lakes. By counting tens of thousands of varves, they believe elapsed time can be determined. However, since varves are so uniform, show no evidence of the slightest erosion, and are deposited over wider areas than tiny "stream deltas," they are better explained by liquefaction. PREDICTION 14: If representative corings are taken in the bottom of any large lake, they will not show laminations as thin, parallel, and extensive as the varves of the Green River formation....

Fossils not formed by gradual processes:

Dead animals and plants quickly decay, are eaten, or are destroyed by the elements. Their preservation as fossils requires rapid burial in sediments thick enough to preserve their bodily form. This rarely happens today. When it does, such as in an avalanche or a volcanic eruption, the blanketing layers are not strata spanning hundreds of thousands of square miles. Liquefaction provides a mechanism for the rapid burial of trillions of fossils in appropriate layers. A similar statement can be made concerning fossilized footprints and tracks of many animals. (See also 21. Rapid Burial on page 7 .)...

The absence of meteorites in deep sediments is consistent only with a rapid deposition of all the sediments. (See 77. Shallow Meteorites on page 28 .)...

Almost all animals are directly or indirectly dependent on plants for food. However, geological formations frequently contain many fossilized animals without fossilized plants. 17 How could they have survived? Apparently the fossilization process involved a sorting that treated plants and animals differently....

The article neglects to mention that a global flood could wash animals into basin areas for burial while plants and trees, having roots, would be somewhat harder to wash away or might take longer to uproot and then get washed into other areas. Like I say, the entire general approach taken by geologists does not appear to be on solid ground.

[B. Rabbit]

Thanks for the insults

Thanks for all of your hypocracy. It makes it easier to deal with you. You have called the entirety of us racists. You have mentioned our insanity. You are just as guilty and yet you take the high road. Very liberal of you gore3000.

[Junior]

Oh, it is extremely relevant, dear child. Darwin was a child of his times; whether he was a latent racist has little or no bearing on the validity of his theory and few if any evolutionists hold to a "hierarchy of races" today. However, when it comes to racism, Christianity has centuries of lead time. From the medieval pogroms against the Jews, to the types of weapons permissible against heathens to the enslavement of the children of Ham, Christianity has practiced racial hatred for a very long time. You are the one who brought race into this argument; the lurkers here will see that you are simply p!$$!ng into the wind on this as you do on everything of which you speak.

[Junior]

BTW - Name ONE (1) species has been observed to have transformed itself into another more complex species.

Ah, the old LBB definition of evolution -- that critters evolve into more complex critters -- which has absolutely no bearing on the real definition of evolution -- that critters change to fit their environments.

[f.Christian]

Left extreme lunatic fringe...liberal too---evolution!

[Junior]

Nonetheless the billion-year figures you see in geology books do not appear to be on any firmer ground than the bishop's calculations were.

When multiple forms of radiometric dating come to the same conclusion as to the age of a rock sample, one can come to a fairly definite conclusion as to the age of that rock. I have a lovely link on radiometric dating from a Christian perspective which you might find interesting.

[Junior]

BTW, the Flood theory of fossil creation does not take into account anomolies, such as animal tracks and rain drop pocks deep within the column (if the geological column was laid down all at once, there would be no opportunity for such to be formed). I also have some lovely links on the fallacy of teh Flood being responsible for the fossil record -- including the above, but also such anomolies as "fast-running trees," the problems with hydrostatic sorting (why are no elephants found with iguanadons?), etc.

[usastandsunited]

An opinion must be based upon something to have relevance, otherwise, it is worthless

And I guess you get to be the one to decide whether a person's opinion is relevant or not.
You need a reality check buddy.

[Junior]

It is fairly obvious when an opinion is unfounded.

[VadeRetro]

Pollen was first mentioned to you in Piltdown_Woman's 1352, which so far you have ignored. While not in the dictionary definition of a real varve, the pollen-layering is part of the signature of a real annual varve and part of how a geologist in any doubt can tell a real varve from a layered artifact of any other origin.

That you are ignoring 1352, a more detailed explanation of the difference between a varve and a Mt. St. Helen's style ash-layering, looks bad in itself. But it's straight from the creationist combat manual to just sort of brazen on no matter how your legs get cut from under you.

[VadeRetro]

You keep posting this YEC crap. Although you have not claimed to be one, their literature seems to have formed your world.

What Would We Expect to Find if the World Had Flooded?

[usastandsunited]

It is fairly obvious when an opinion is unfounded.
So back to the original response. When I say no one knows for sure the earth's age".
It sounds like you are saying that is a very naive response to the question.

[Junior]

Down to the year, no. However, geologists have a good idea, based upon actual evidence, that the Earth is somewhere between 4 billion and 4.5 billion years old. Absolutely no evidence points to an Earth only a few thousand years old, and any "opinion" that this is the case is obviously unfounded and is to be dismissed out of hand. Note, the geologists base their estimates on actual evidence; Bible thumpers base their "opinions" on faith.

[PatrickHenry]

Since way back in post 1081, g3k has been asked: HOW OLD IS THE EARTH?. Still no answer, except for dodges, evasions, excuses, and attempts to provoke a flame war (and thus an excuse to have the thread pulled).

It can't be very difficult for someone who has surveyed all Nobel Prize winning work and has declared that it all disproves evolution. An intellect of such sweeping power should be able to give us his answer. HOW OLD IS THE EARTH?.

[Physicist]

I sincerely apologize for my rudeness and foolish words, Physicist.

Accepted.

The fact that placing an arbitrary mass next to another arbitrary mass results in a predictable perturbation. This is done in student labs everyday, where students are asked to measure the "gravitational constant" G by the use of a torsion balance.

Oh, you can measure gravity, sure. I'm willing to bet that you have not performed torsion-balance tests for the moon, however, or for the galaxy. Ultimately, you trust the practitioners in the field to perform different types of tests, and you trust them when they say that the theory is a good fit to the data. In this way, the universality of gravitation and the common descent of species (to compare apples to apples) are on the same intellectual footing from the layman's point of view.

Universal gravitation has overwhelming experimental evidence. It can be observed in the present at any time we wish.

But there's a fly in that ointment. Once you get beyond the scale of the solar system, a naive application of Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation breaks down. Stars on the rim of the galaxy orbit too quickly than can be accounted for by adding up the visible matter of the galaxy. (Google up the exact phrase "flat rotation curve" and you'll get a heap of information about this.) The standard explanation is that there's an undiscovered form of invisible matter permeating the galaxy, but until the precise nature of dark matter is elucidated, it falls in the category of an ad-hoc "fudge factor". (Amusingly, it's the creationists who howl the loudest about this.) If there is no dark matter--and we haven't found it yet--then gravity cannot have the same form everywhere and at all scales. In other words, gravity is not universal.

The same cannot be said of evolution. If for no other reason, its time scale is too large. Meaningful predictions cannot be verified.

I can level the same charge against universal gravitation, and in a supreme twist of irony, the relevant time scales are about the same. You see, in order to examine the behavior of gravity on a large scale, it is necessary to observe the light from distant stars and galaxies. Light has a finite speed, however, so when we observe the motion of stars around the galaxy, we are looking back 100,000 years, because they are up to 100,000 light years away. (Incidentally, 100,000 years is about as far back as you have to look in the fossil record to see evolutionarily meaningful changes in human fossils.) If you want to test the universality of gravitation on a still larger scale, by looking at the motions of galaxies in a cluster, you have to look back 100 million years. (In the fossil record, this takes you back to the time of the dinosaurs.) To test on a cosmologically meaningful scale takes you back to the time when life was beginning on Earth.

I myself have not performed these fossil-light tests of the universality of gravitation. (They have been performed by people whose word I take for it, however, with the dark-matter-contingent confirmation I mentioned before.) I have, however, personally performed tests of evolution upon the fossil record.

The slate beds of Pennsylvania provide a remarkably complete picture of a coastal ecosystem over a 34-million-year span of time. People have assembled long chains of fossils showing the morphological changes in several classes of animal. All it takes to falsify the picture of descent-with-modification is to find "later" forms in "earlier" beds. With my own hands I have dug fossil crinoids, trilobites and brachiopods, and verified that they occurred in exactly the beds where they should.

[VadeRetro]

When I say no one knows for sure the earth's age". It sounds like you are saying that is a very naive response to the question.

Several studies by several methods seem to bracket the answer rather tightly. If you know what you're talking about in discussing the age of the earth, you have some awareness of that.

Below is a table of radiometric ages derived from groups of meteorites:

Type	Number Dated	Method	Age (billions of years)
Chondrites (CM, CV, H, L, LL, E)	13	Sm-Nd	4.21 +/- 0.76
Carbonaceous chondrites	4	Rb-Sr	4.37 +/- 0.34
Chondrites (undisturbed H, LL, E)	38	Rb-Sr	4.50 +/- 0.02
Chondrites (H, L, LL, E)	50	Rb-Sr	4.43 +/- 0.04
H Chondrites (undisturbed)	17	Rb-Sr	4.52 +/- 0.04
H Chondrites	15	Rb-Sr	4.59 +/- 0.06
L Chondrites (relatively undisturbed)	6	Rb-Sr	4.44 +/- 0.12
L Chondrites	5	Rb-Sr	4.38 +/- 0.12
LL Chondrites (undisturbed)	13	Rb-Sr	4.49 +/- 0.02
LL Chondrites	10	Rb-Sr	4.46 +/- 0.06
E Chondrites (undisturbed)	8	Rb-Sr	4.51 +/- 0.04
E Chondrites	8	Rb-Sr	4.44 +/- 0.13
Eucrites (polymict)	23	Rb-Sr	4.53 +/- 0.19
Eucrites	11	Rb-Sr	4.44 +/- 0.30
Eucrites	13	Lu-Hf	4.57 +/- 0.19
Diogenites	5	Rb-Sr	4.45 +/- 0.18
Iron (plus iron from St. Severin)	8	Re-Os	4.57 +/- 0.21
After Dalrymple (1991, p. 291); duplicate studies on identical meteorite types omitted.

As shown in the table, there is excellent agreement on about 4.5 billion years, between several meteorites and by several different dating methods. Note that young-Earthers cannot accuse us of selective use of data -- the above table includes a significant fraction of all meteorites on which isotope dating has been attempted. According to Dalrymple (1991, p. 286) , less than 100 meteorites have been subjected to isotope dating, and of those about 70 yield ages with low analytical error.

Further, the oldest age determinations of individual meteorites generally give concordant ages by multiple radiometric means, or multiple tests across different samples. For example:

Meteorite	Dated	Method	Age (billions of years)
Allende	whole rock	Ar-Ar	4.52 +/- 0.02
	whole rock	Ar-Ar	4.53 +/- 0.02
	whole rock	Ar-Ar	4.48 +/- 0.02
	whole rock	Ar-Ar	4.55 +/- 0.03
	whole rock	Ar-Ar	4.55 +/- 0.03
	whole rock	Ar-Ar	4.57 +/- 0.03
	whole rock	Ar-Ar	4.50 +/- 0.02
	whole rock	Ar-Ar	4.56 +/- 0.05
Guarena	whole rock	Ar-Ar	4.44 +/- 0.06
	13 samples	Rb-Sr	4.46 +/- 0.08
Shaw	whole rock	Ar-Ar	4.43 +/- 0.06
	whole rock	Ar-Ar	4.40 +/- 0.06
	whole rock	Ar-Ar	4.29 +/- 0.06
Olivenza	18 samples	Rb-Sr	4.53 +/- 0.16
	whole rock	Ar-Ar	4.49 +/- 0.06
Saint Severin	4 samples	Sm-Nd	4.55 +/- 0.33
	10 samples	Rb-Sr	4.51 +/- 0.15
	whole rock	Ar-Ar	4.43 +/- 0.04
	whole rock	Ar-Ar	4.38 +/- 0.04
	whole rock	Ar-Ar	4.42 +/- 0.04
Indarch	9 samples	Rb-Sr	4.46 +/- 0.08
	12 samples	Rb-Sr	4.39 +/- 0.04
Juvinas	5 samples	Sm-Nd	4.56 +/- 0.08
	5 samples	Rb-Sr	4.50 +/- 0.07
Moama	3 samples	Sm-Nd	4.46 +/- 0.03
	4 samples	Sm-Nd	4.52 +/- 0.05
Y-75011	9 samples	Rb-Sr	4.50 +/- 0.05
	7 samples	Sm-Nd	4.52 +/- 0.16
	5 samples	Rb-Sr	4.46 +/- 0.06
	4 samples	Sm-Nd	4.52 +/- 0.33
Angra dos Reis	7 samples	Sm-Nd	4.55 +/- 0.04
	3 samples	Sm-Nd	4.56 +/- 0.04
Mundrabrilla	silicates	Ar-Ar	4.50 +/- 0.06
	silicates	Ar-Ar	4.57 +/- 0.06
	olivine	Ar-Ar	4.54 +/- 0.04
	plagioclase	Ar-Ar	4.50 +/- 0.04
Weekeroo Station	4 samples	Rb-Sr	4.39 +/- 0.07
	silicates	Ar-Ar	4.54 +/- 0.03
After Dalrymple (1991, p. 286); meteorites dated by only a single means omitted.

Also note that the meteorite ages (both when dated mainly by Rb-Sr dating in groups, and by multiple means individually) are in exact agreement with the solar system "model lead age" produced earlier.

The Age of the Earth.

So yes. To claim there's no reason to think one thing versus another is to appear uninformed.

[whattajoke]

Fascinating stuff Gore... You refuse to answer a simple question (we're not even asking for an exact answer... we're looking for +/- a few billion years!) by stating over and over that it is an irrelevant question. If I had time, I'd scour the net for recent relevant articles about the earth's age, post them on FR, ping you, and see what happens.

You continue to dodge and whine that the question is somehow off track (which it is NOT, in the least), yet on a thread about the state of Ohio putting in a disclaimer in textbooks (remember that?!) you have had no problem posting posts and responses regarding the tired crap about evolutionists being racists, the 10 Commandments being relevant, flagella, Louis Pasteur, Mt. St. Helens, and the Sistine Chapel to name just a few.

Seems to me you pick and choose what you deem "irrelevant," which only serves to make you look even more foolish.

[VadeRetro]

The layers you find at Mt. St. Helens meet the standard definition of "varves" as most of the articles such a search turns up note.

You're even ignoring that your own chosen and linked definition specifically calls for alternating layers of clay and silt, not layers of different consistencies of volcanic ash. No geologist except a creationist would be confused for more than thirty seconds telling one from the other.

Why are you doing this? What would anyone who can see what you miss be thinking in letting himself be informed by one so wilfully, blissfully ignorant?

[js1138]

When I first read the Bible it was with quite a bit of skepticism, and with the presumption it was written in the middle ages to control the peasants.

Where on earth did you go to school, child? The middle ages? That's not even in left field.

[usastandsunited]

You didn't have to copy/paste the whole web page from that site on your post. A simple link would have done. Thanks anyway, I had already read through that site. I believe that one came up second on google on a "Age of the Earth" query. If you go ahead and read the bottom portion of the page, you will notice it devotes a big portion of it to discredit the "Young Earth" theory.
Right or wrong, that does tell me there are some differing opinions out there.